I agree, I should have clarified I actually meant setting up a wireguard server on a vps, not developing and alternative to wireguard or openvpn.
I’m happy for your successes and your enthusiasm! I’m in a different position, I’m kinda very lazy and have little enthusiasm regarding coding/devops stuff specifically, but I enjoy backsitting the Copilot. I also think that you’re definitely learning more by doing everything yourself, but it’s not really true that you learn nothing by only backsitting LLM, because it doesn’t just produce working solution from a single prompt, you have to reprompt and refine things again and again until you get what you want and it’s working as expected. I feel myself a bit overpowered this way because it lets me get things done extraordinarily fast. For example, at 00:00 I was only choosing a VPS to buy and by 04:00 I already had wireguard server with port forwarding up and running and all my clientside stuff configured and updated accordingly. And I had some exotic issues during setup which I also troubleshoot using LLM, like for example, my clientside wg.conf file getting wrong SELinux context and wg-quick daemon refusing to work because of that:
unconfined_u:object_r:user_home_t:s0
I never knew such this thing even exist, and LLM just casually explained that and provided a fix:
sudo semanage fcontext -a -t etc_t "/etc/wireguard(/.*)?"
sudo restorecon -Rv /etc/wireguard
Oops, I meant self-hosting a wireguard server, not actually doing an alternative to wireguard or openvpn themselves…
and, port forwarding… I don’t know where are you running that, but linux iptables can do that too, in the kernel, with better performance.
With my previous paid VPN I had to use natpmpc to ask their server for forwarding/binding ports for me, and I also had to do that every 45 seconds. It’s nice to get a bash script running in a systemd demon that does that in a loop, and also parses output and saves remote ports server gave us this time to file in case we need them (like, for setting up a tor relay). Also, I got another script and demon for tor relay that monitors forwarded port changes (from a file) and updates torrc and restarts tor container. All this by Copilot, without knowing bash at all. Without having to write complex regexes to parse that output or regexes to overwrite tor config, etc. It’s not a single prompt, it requires some troubleshooting and clarifications and ultimately I got to know some of the low level details of this myself. Which is also great.
doing something wrong is worse than doing nothing.
Is this a general statement right? Try to forget about context then and read that again 😅
I actually think the moments when AI goes wrong are the moments that stimulate you and make you realize what you’re doing and what you want to achieve better. And when you do subsequent prompts to fix the issue, you essentially do problem solving on figuring out what to ask to make it do the exact thing you want. And it’s never going to be always right, simply because most of cases of it being wrong is you not providing enough details about what you actually want. So step-by-step AI usage with clarifications and fixes is always going to be brain-stimulating problem solving process.
I’m in the same boat with many things I’m using AI for. I would never write natpmpc port-forwarding demons, I would never create my own DIY VPN, etc, if I had to do this all by myself. Not because I can’t, but because I don’t enjoy spending my time diving into tons of manuals for various utilities, protocols, OS level stuff, networking, etc. I would simply give up and use some premade solutions. But with AI, I was able to get it all done while also quickly getting to know some surface-level things about all of this stuff myself.
I think they meant it doesn’t return to non-AI-user levels when you do the same task on your own immediately afterwards. But if you keep doing the task on your own for some time, I’d expect it to return to those levels rather fast.
My understanding is that it’s for tracking/reporting purposes, and to mitigate future offenses by banning those IPs. You can report an IP to an ISP for CSAM violations, but it’s not as useful when the user’s on a VPN.
Don’t think even the most extreme actors go that far, link could be opened accidentally, etc…
Anyway, from what another poster here linked, it looks like Catbox might actually not be banning any VPNs at all on its own, this might be some kind of middleware/routing infrastructure issue.
With CSAM, you want to block uploading and downloading, because both are problematic for a host.
At that point, if such content is already posted there and available for download, it doesn’t matter if it is only allowed to be downloaded via clearnet or VPNs as well. Blocking VPNs doesn’t make any difference here.
I’m 99% sure it doesn’t work that way. The Lemmy instance caches a preview image for posted links. But scrolling past without clicking a link will not expose your IP to Catbox unless you have an auto-preview setting enabled that opens/caches every link you scroll past automatically, which I don’t believe is enabled by default.
I’ve seen a debate regarding lemmynsfw with some people asking to turn off caching/proxying for images. I don’t know what’s their current status on this, but on my instance even thumbnails were not visible for catbox images. I’m not sure if it’s disabled or it’s the instance server itself having trouble accessing catbox.
Thanks, this is surprising! I assumed my VPN wouldn’t ever block anything, because I’ve never seen that before, and thus the block was Catbox’s fault, but from what they write in their FAQ I start to question this. Maybe there is some large scale intermediary/middleware/mitm that make this happen. Idk, this is the first time I see anything like this. The server I’m currently using is in Switzerland, but I’ve also had those blocks with multiple VPN servers in other EU countries.
but they also have illegitimate uses that (what I understand to be) a one-man team is likely not prepared to deal with
This would be somewhat believable excuse if they only blocked uploading/posting under VPNs. But they block viewing under VPNs as well, which you only do if your sole purpose is logging IP addresses of viewers. In this scenario catbox images posted to Lemmy for example, they don’t only reveal your IP the moment they are loaded when you scroll your feed, they also associate it with the site from where the request was initiated (your Lemmy instance).
I hate catbox. I can’t see images posted via catbox because for some reason catbox is very actively and aggressively bans VPNs. Yeah, you heard that right: they ban VPNs, not only for posting, even for viewing! I managed to find one VPN server that worked well… for few weeks. Until it got banned as well. Someone once said catbox is a honeypot. Idk about that, but their VPN policy is definitely honeypot-tier.
Added: What’s even more funny - imgur also used to ban VPNs, but my current server, at the moment I picked it I choose by criteria that both imgur and catbox and some third service should work, and few weeks later imgur still works while catbox don’t, which means catbox bans VPNs more aggressively than imgur! Really makes you hmmmm.
Added: After reading SatyrSack reply I’m not sure anymore. Maybe it was too rash to blame Catbox. It’s unclear who or what is responsible for the block, maybe neither the source nor the destination.
This “dopamine hit” isn’t a permanent source of happiness, just repeatedly clicking “randomize” button not going to make you feel constantly high, after 3 maybe 5 hits you will start noticing a common pattern that gets old really fast. And to make it better you need to come up with ways to declare different structures, to establish rulesets, checklists, to make some unique pieces at certain checkpoints yourself, while allowing LLM to fill all the boilerplate around it, etc. Which is more effort but also produces more rewarding results. I like to think about it this way: LLM produces the best most generic thing possible for the prompt. Then I look at it and consider which parts I want to be less generic and reprompt. In programming or scripting, I’m okay with “best generic thing” that solves the problem I have. If I were writing novels, maybe it’s usable for some kind of top-down writing where you start with high-level structure, then clarify it step by step down to the lowest level. You can use AI to write around this structure, and if something is too boring/generic it’s again simply a matter of refining this structure more and expanding something into multiple more detailed things.